The party's over?

This Feb. 18, 2010, photo shows former House Majority Leader Dick Armey speaking in Washington. Eased out with an $8 million payout provided by an influential GOP fundraiser, Armey says he has left a conservative Tea Party group, FreedomWorks, because of an internal split over the group's future direction.

We saw it coming, the slow dismantling of what was known as the tea party. We all did. It was born of fear and grew into anger when the U.S. stumbled into the deep recession back in 2008 and '09. Small groups of Americans - many of them hard-working, conservative men and women who had helped build our country through long careers. The movement grew and the small pockets became a political party.

And backed by the deep pockets of the Koch brothers and nurtured with the venom spit out by the likes of Grover Norquist and the Americans for Tax Reform, it turned angry and bitter. It infected our real political parties, aligning itself with the Republican Party, much to the GOP's chagrin, and hardening bitter partisanship and inoculating many intelligent, conservative Americans from reason. Any reason. Taxes are bad, and budget cuts are good was the battle cry - and look where we are now.

The swift and sudden departure of Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Dick Armey from the tea party's lockstep signals its eventual decline. And we have to wonder what legacy the lower case tea party leaves.

Currently, the movement appears to be without power or credence as its ideas and philosophies tend to be seen as more of a symptom rather than a cure to the fiscal cliff mess. Several GOP pundits have blamed the tea party movement for preventing Republicans from taking control of the Senate by knocking off moderate Republican Senators in primary fights only to see the seat eventually lost to a Democrat.

In a GOP with a need to return to the philosophy of the big tent to be taken seriously on the national scene, they are a minority whose tactics and beliefs seem to be becoming outdated as quickly as they came into vogue.

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The party's over?

We saw it coming, the slow dismantling of what was known as the tea party. We all did. It was born of fear and grew into anger when the U.S. stumbled into the deep recession back in 2008 and '09.